Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

Our good friend Tom Murphy points to this remarkable video by PR Watch. It is a compelling, if crude piece of propaganda. I think people outside the news industry have this immaculate conception of reporting, as if reporters are just supposed to know what is happening without any sources. Of course companies and other organizations are going to send them material, what’s wrong with that?

Sadly, you can fool all the people some of the time. When that happens, when disillusion sets in, the price you pay is very steep. If you cannot persuade by honest methods, that may be a sign that your message lacks merit.

PR at it’s finest is understanding your client’s role in society, and communicating that both to your client and to the society in which you operate.

Despite obvious support for the idea last week from thousands of visitors on its new customer suggestion Web site, IdeaStorm, the company said it's not yet building machines with Linux pre-loaded for the consumer and business markets.

Last Friday night, Dell posted a note on the IdeaStorm Web site saying it was listening to thousands of users who had posted messages asking for Linux on its machines by moving forward to certify three of its corporate hardware lines -- OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Dell Precision workstations -- for use with Novell SUSE Linux.

My guess is that one of the Asian manufacturers will be the first to build a Linux PC.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is suing a Hong Kong company for allegedly making more than $2.7 million from illegal trades they made by reading corporate press releases before they were made public.

The search engine giant showed off its ambition yesterday to expand its business with the federal government, kicking off a two-day sales meeting that attracted nearly 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members eager to learn more about its technology offerings.

Google has ramped up its sales force in the Washington area in the past year to adapt its technology products to the needs of the military, civilian agencies and the intelligence community. ...

... Google declined to comment on which federal agencies it serves and would not reveal its revenue from government work.

But publicly available data indicate that the nascent business quadrupled in just one year, from $73,000 in 2005 to $312,000 in 2006, according to FedSpending.org, a nonprofit unit of OMB Watch, an advocacy group that tracks federal contracts.

Google is obviously looking to do far more then $312,000 in the future.

The Department of Homeland Security is testing a data-mining program that would attempt to spot terrorists by combing vast amounts of information about average Americans, such as flight and hotel reservations. Similar to a Pentagon program killed by Congress in 2003 over concerns about civil liberties, the new program could take effect as soon as next year.

I can't be the only one to notice that this administration is far more interested in tracking people than cargo.

There was an unexpected drop in orders of durable goods across industry sectors as demand slid by a record 8 per cent to $204bn in January. The biggest monthly fall ever recorded underlined the continued risks to US economic growth from weak domestic business demand, which has lagged behind consumer spending.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Central banks are increasingly diversifying their reserves, including cutting holdings of dollars, according to a survey sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, the U.K.'s second-largest bank.

Paul Feldman resigned on Feb. 21 as co-chairman of the American Health Information Community’s Confidentiality, Privacy and Security (CPS) Workgroup, citing in a letter to Interim National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Robert Kolodner the panel’s lack of “substantial progress toward the development of comprehensive privacy and security policies that must be at the core of a nationwide health information network.”

Scott Kirsner, freelancerHis preference for PR agencies tends toward the smaller or independent PR pro. "The biggest agencies are all horrible, unresponsive and slow to return calls...you have to explain the story you're working on 16 times to 16 different people... The most helpful have been self-employed PR people who have the freedom to tell the client, 'I'm not going to call the Wall Street Journal because they're not going cover it.'"

Friday, February 23, 2007

The emerging technology special interest group of the Industry Advisory Council has posted a survey about Service Oriented Architecture. If you get a chance, go and fill it out. It should take only 10 minutes or so, promises Greg Hauser, who is the chair for the IAC SOA committee.

Not long ago I was at a meeting of IASA where the speaker asked how many had used SOA in their programming, only a few raised their hands. Cleary we are in the early adopter stage.

TJX, the parent company of discount retailers TJ Maxx and Marshalls, said Wednesday that the data breach it reported last month is bigger than it first thought.

As my colleague Ellen Nakashima reported yesterday, TJX initially said it was hacked into sometime between May 2006 and January 2007. Now, however, it thinks its computer system was also hacked a whole two years earlier, in July 2005 and on "various subsequent dates" that year.

During a joint appearance with Michael Dell that was sponsored by the Texas Public Education Reform Foundation, Jobs took on the unions by first comparing schools to small businesses, and school principals to CEOs. He then asked rhetorically: "What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "

No one would dare talk about police departments or firefighters in this way. I have never understood why this is acceptable where teachers are concered. What does Jobs actually know about public education?

Monday, February 19, 2007

The Homeland Security Department has no clear authority at this time over a $1 billion fund for public safety agency interoperable communications equipment that it has been publicizing as a first responder grant program, according to a Congressional Research Service memorandum.

For years our good friend Tom Murphy has been writing about the abuse of Flash, and still, we see otherwise smart companies using flash on their introductory page. Why? How does flash help someone looking for information on your site?

Try to avoid PDF. There are circumstances, such as long documents, where using PDF makes sense. Most of the time search engine friendly HTML is your best choice.

When writing for the web remember that large font and white space are your friends. This is a world of short attention-spans, so short, punchy paragraphs are what you should present. It may be useful to link to larger, more detailed documents, especially for investor relations or GSA catalog information, but the initial presentation should be succinct.

Avoid nonspecific jargon and buzzwords. Leading provider of advanced technology solutions to the government and military, or similarly vague sounding phrases don’t tell the reader anything. Try to be specific. It is far easier for the reader to go from the specific to the general rather than the reverse.

Make sure your contact information is current. Recently I have been working on a project that has involved looking at numerous corporate websites. I am stunned by the number whose contact information is not current. It is also helpful to be specific in contact information, compare:

It is much easier to make in inquiry if you know who you are addressing, rather than send a note to “sales.”

Dee Rambeau and Chris Bechtel wrote the best piece on online newsrooms I have ever seen. I can’t add anything to what they said, save to emphasize the obvious. Contact information needs to appear on every release and releases should be posted in HTML, not PDF.

The speech, scholars say, was a turning point in U.S. history. As the Revolutionary War was winding down, some wanted to make Washington king. Some whispered conspiracy, trying to seduce him with the trappings of power. But Washington renounced them all.

By resigning his commission as commander in chief to the Continental Congress -- then housed at the Annapolis capitol -- Washington laid the cornerstone for an American principle that persists today: Civilians, not generals, are ultimately in charge of military power.

Most of the blog search tools have the ability to locate the most recent links and identify the most influential blogs (at least in terms of inbound links). We need more capabilities. What if you want to know what blogs were writing about your client last year? or the year before that?

What if you don’t want to know what the high traffic blogs are saying about your client, what if it is precisely the small guys you want to look at? Suppose you wanted to do a search on what small blogs were saying about your client three years ago?

What if you wanted to know what the economic blogs were saying about your client one year ago? We need tools to enable us to do more precise searches.

It is the first federal case for which independent bloggers have been given official credentials along with reporters from the traditional news media, said Robert A. Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association. Mr. Cox negotiated access for the bloggers.

This is the second time Cox has taken credit for arranging for press credentials for the FireDogLake bloggers, and for the second time FireDogLake has denied it:

One correction, though: the MBA did NOT negotiate our media passes. We have been working on getting passes for this trial from the moment Libby was indicted. Jane and I made calls to the courthouse, e-mailed, wrote letters, and worked on getting credential from very early on. To emphasize our commitment to doing serious coverage, we enlisted the help of Arianna, whose Huffington Post name was more recognizable than FDL to folks not familiar with how blogs had been covering this investigation. But the gaining of our three media passes? That was OUR work.

Why persist in taking credit for getting bloggers credentials when you didn’t do it? It doesn’t make you or your organization look good.

A front-page article yesterday about bloggers covering the perjury trial ofI. Lewis Libby Jr. referred imprecisely to the role of Robert A. Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, in securing credentials. Mr. Cox negotiated access for his association, which was the first blogger group to be granted credentials to cover the trial. He did not negotiate on behalf of firedoglake.com and other blogs that received their credentials later.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Experts say the stubborn attachment to page views also may be keeping some sites from improving their usability.

Jakob Nielsen, a Web design expert with Nielsen Norman Group, notes that many news sites force visitors to click multiple times to read longer stories in sections, even though he would much prefer scrolling down a long story and avoiding interruptions.

"Because you are measuring the wrong things, you are driving your project in the wrong direction," Nielsen said. "You are not maximizing what causes value. You are maximizing the things a computer can count easily."

For my part, I think the future of online advertising lies in embeding key words and links in RSS feeds. A whole science will grow up around learning which key words to use in what sort of feeds.

Suppose the late Saddam Hussein had hired Washington PR powerhouse, Smoke, Mirrors & Hatched, and suppose Smoke Mirrors & Hatched had been able to effectively counter Judith Miller’s bogus reporting for the New York Times. The United States might never have gone to war. We might have been able to concentrate on getting bin Laden.

As this is being written a third aircraft carrier task force is sailing towards Iran. There is a real chance of another war breaking out. Had Iran been able to engage the services of Smoke Mirrors & Hatched the war propaganda might have been exposed. Just because a client and PR firm are sleazy doesn't mean that they don’t have a legitimate point of view.

Monday, February 05, 2007

The design and development of the CapWIN system is being performed using open standards, wherever possible. As a system designed to enable data interoperability across multiple technical platforms, jurisdictions and public safety disciplines, CapWIN personnel are participating in the implementation and development of new data exchange standards at the state, local and Federal levels. CapWIN is planning to add a dedicated transformation server to handle XML transactions that utilize a multitude of XML Data Dictionaries (DD) and Data Models (DM).

They are new to me. As long as I have been working on this I am still discovering information sharing organizations.

Two weeks after a senior Pentagon official suggested that corporations should pressure their law firms to stop assisting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, major companies have turned the tables on the Pentagon and issued statements supporting the law firms' work on behalf of terrorism suspects. ...

... Brackett Denniston, senior vice president and general counsel of General Electric, said the company strongly disagrees with the suggestion that it discriminate against law firms that do such work. "Justice is served when there is quality representation even for the unpopular," Denniston said in a statement.

That's General Electric, major defense contractor and owner of NBC News.